Server Brooke Armstrong, left, serves draft beer to Brian Stevens and his friend Neal Hundt, not pictured, Thursday at the Mountain Sun Pub and Brewery in Boulder. Mountain Sun will be opening Longs Peak Pub & Taphouse on the ground floor of the Roosevelt Park Apartments, the developer of the project has announced.
(
JEREMY PAPASSO
)

LONGMONT -- Boulder-based craft brewer Mountain Sun will be opening Longs Peak Pub & Taphouse on the ground floor of the Roosevelt Park Apartments, the developer of the project has announced.

Inspire Salon & Spa will also be leasing a 2,000-square-foot space along Main Street in the new mixed-use building. Owner Nicole Smathers said she'll keep her existing salon, which is also about 2,000 square feet and just down the street at 512 Main, open as well.

Mountain Sun launched its first pub at 1535 Pearl Street in 1993 and has since added two more Boulder locations and one in Denver. It will occupy between 4,500 and 5,000 square feet in the southeast corner of the 115-unit apartment building, which is at the northwest corner of Longs Peak Avenue and Main Street, according to Keith Burden, one of the principals in Burden Inc., the project's developer.

"(That corner) was their choice not only because of the visibility and the traffic but also the size of the space," Burden said.

The other corner retail space, at Longs Peak and Coffman, is much smaller. They're still shopping for the right tenant there, Burden said.

"We've had quite a bit of interest in the 2,700-square-foot space and probably could have leased it, but we really want to get a breakfast/lunch type concept in there," he said.

Mountain Sun proprietor Kevin Daly said the Longmont facility will be similar to the company's other pubs. Five years ago Mountain Sun opened up Vine Street Pub & Brewery, at 17th and Vine in Denver, which now serves as not only another restaurant outlet but as the company's flagship brewery.

Advertisement

"We've been looking to grow, and we've got this brewery in Denver that's able to brew a lot of beer," Daly said. "We can now open up pubs without having the overhead and expense of having a brewery."

He said he found out about Roosevelt Park Apartments when Burden called him. A member of the Longmont Downtown Development Authority staff has a son who plays soccer with the son of Mountain Sun's business manager, who lives in Longmont, and that's how the connection started, he said.

Daly said he hopes to be open by next spring.

"We're excited about it," he said. "The Burdens (Keith and his dad, Cotton, two of the principals of Burden Inc.) seem like good people."

Smathers said she hopes to have Inspire open sometime this winter; if not December then by January. Her business is celebrating its 10-year anniversary in December.

"I've actually been looking for probably the last two years for ... what I'm calling it is an expansion space," she said.

She wanted to have the second location be somewhere in the downtown area so she could travel easily between the two during the day. Her husband, Tom, who owns Abo's Pizza stores in Boulder and Niwot, knows Cotton Burden and they started talking.

"One of our goals with this salon is we want to become sort of a training, an advanced training facility," Smathers said.

Burden said that the April snows delayed construction at Roosevelt Park Apartments by a few weeks, so the target for its completion has been pushed back to January. Along with the 115 apartment units, Roosevelt Park Apartments will feature a 219-space parking garage, about a third of which will be public spaces; and two artists' studios will be north of the salon along Main Street. Those will be controlled by the LDDA.

The LDDA put up about $3.5 million for the $21 million project, and the city put in another $1.4 million, including about $700,000 in fee waivers. The remainder was put up by Burden Inc.